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Every accounting firm knows the January dread. Preparers sit ready at their dual monitors, practice management software is configured, and yet almost no actual tax preparation occurs. Instead, staff...
Sep 24, 2026/ recent · long reads
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When a prospective client contacts a law firm, the clock starts running immediately. In legal services, responsiveness often determines whether a firm signs a desirable matter or loses it to the...
Sep 24, 2026
Most AI business cases presented to business owners are built on an accounting illusion. A vendor or internal advocate tallies up minutes saved across routine tasks, multiplies that time by an...
Sep 22, 2026/ selected notes
All dispatches →01 / AI Agents
When a founder signs a contract for a static website or an accounting software rollout, the finish line is straightforward. The pages render, the bank feeds sync, the invoices reconcile, and the...
Sep 21, 2026
02 / Playbooks
Over the past two years, almost every founder running a $1M to $10M company has handed generative AI tools to their staff. You bought seats for chat interfaces, added AI writing assistants to your...
Sep 14, 2026
03 / AI Agents
When Anthropic shipped Claude Cowork, it gave knowledge workers a tool that feels like a breakthrough. Instead of pasting paragraphs back and forth into a browser window, you can point Claude at...
Sep 14, 2026
/ the feed · everything we've published
An AI agent evaluation plan template is a fixed set of sections that turns scattered agent testing into one signed decision about whether a workflow changes hands. Eight sections carry the whole...
Kurt Fischman · Aug 19, 2026
An AI agent use case library indexes candidate workflows by the work they contain, which is a different artifact from the ranked listicle the category keeps publishing. Every list in this category...
Kurt Fischman · Aug 19, 2026
Nothing about a deployed chatbot upgrades into an agent, which is why the promotion usually arrives as a rebuild disguised as a rename. A chatbot is scoped to a conversation: it matches an incoming...
Kurt Fischman · Aug 18, 2026
Orchestration architecture describes the control layer that routes specialized agents through complex business workflows. Unlike single-agent systems that execute predefined scripts, orchestration...
Kurt Fischman · Aug 14, 2026
Handoffs are a discipline, not an accident. Specialized agents operate reliably in isolation, but handoffs fail in production when orchestration treats state ownership as implicit rather than...
Kurt Fischman · Aug 3, 2026
Agentification maturity is not measured by agent count. Start with one high-value workflow, establish guardrails and governance early, and transition ownership to the function that runs it.
Kurt Fischman · Jul 29, 2026
An AI agent maturity model for a business team is a staged framework that ranks how much work a business can safely hand to agents, and where along that path it currently sits. Most models split the...
Kurt Fischman · Jul 27, 2026
Agent readiness is the business case for AI agents restated as a production question: can you afford the oversight, not can you afford the license. Most guides answer a different question. They walk...
Kurt Fischman · Jul 27, 2026
Five words get sold as five products. They are one dial with a price on each notch, and the notch you can afford to buy is rarely the notch you can afford to supervise.
Kurt Fischman · Jul 25, 2026
Seventy-five terms sounds like a lot until you notice most of them are selling you something. The market for AI agents for business is arranged as a shopping problem: ranked lists, best-of grids, a...
Kurt Fischman · Jul 22, 2026
AI agents for business get sold as a shopping problem, and the whole market is arranged to keep it that way: ranked listicles, best-of grids, a leaderboard of tools. That framing hides the actual...
Kurt Fischman · Jul 22, 2026
> An AI agent implementation playbook is the ordered sequence that moves an agent from a chosen use case to trusted, unsupervised production. Its seven stages (scope, score, design, build, evaluate,...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026
> An AI agent risk assessment framework scores a single agent workflow on five factors (autonomy, reversibility, data sensitivity, customer impact, and auditability) to decide how much oversight it...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026
> AI agent security is the practice of capping what a deployed agent, and anyone who hijacks it, can do to the systems and data it touches. The agent's defining flaw, that it cannot tell data from...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026
> An AI agent governance framework is the set of runtime controls (scoped permissions, approval gates, exception queues, human review, audit trails, and a kill switch) plus the single accountable...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026
> An AI agent ROI measurement framework separates an agent's return into four classes (cost avoidance, capacity creation, risk and quality, and revenue lift) and measures each one on the clock it...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 22, 2026
> AI agent performance metrics are the numbers a business tracks to confirm a deployed AI agent does its job correctly, safely, affordably, and fast enough to matter. Marshal sorts them into five...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 11, 2026
> AI agent evaluation is the testing discipline that decides whether an agent can be trusted to own a business workflow. It runs on three surfaces: reliability (does the agent complete the job),...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
> Choosing the right AI agent use case means passing each candidate workflow through three gates in order: value (is the job worth owning), risk (can the business afford the worst day), and...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
> AI agent use cases are business workflows an agent can own end to end, and they sort by function: sales, marketing, customer service, finance and admin, HR, and IT operations. A use case is real...
Kurt Fischman · Jun 10, 2026
Machine-like is the services layer that bridges frontier AI and business operations.